eComm America 2011

The Emerging Communications Conference & Awards will be back in San Francisco June 27-29, 2011. We are once again pleased to be one of the primary sponsors of this event. The schedule is now available with speakers from

Speakers

Voxeons will be speaking at eComm 2011 include CEO Jonathan Taylor, Chief Architect Jose de Castro, Director of Conversations Dan York and Voxeo co-founder Johnny Diggz in his role as Founder of Geeks Without Bounds.

UPDATE: Due to Dan’s travel, Dan York and Johnny Diggz have swapped their speaking timeslots.

Monday, June 27

Onward The Disruption – Trends in Communications Application Development

Jonathan Taylor, CEO, Voxeo
Date: Monday, June 27
Time: 12:15 – 12:30 PM

What is the next wave in communications application development? In 1999, Jonathan Taylor wrote three words on a whiteboard summing up the state of communications application development: “computer telephony sucks”. Those three words would ignite a passion to figure out how to make app development “not suck” and open up telephony to the hordes of web developers already out there creating apps. Over the ensuing 12 years, Jonathan has been leading the disruption of telephony application development, first with XML-based telephony offerings and more recently with API-based services using web programming languages such as Ruby, PHP and JavaScript. Along the way, he’s expanded “communications applications” beyond simply voice into text messaging, instant messaging, web chat, Twitter and more – all the while also solving the communications deployment problem by rolling out cloud-based solutions way before “cloud” was the buzz it is today.

In this session, Jonathan will outline the waves of communication development he’s seen and more importantly what he sees as the next waves disrupting communications. He’ll share the patterns he sees and the vision he has of where we as an industry need to be focusing.

How IPv6 Will Kill Telecom – And What We Need To Do About It

Dan York, Director of Conversations, Voxeo
Date: Monday, June 27
Time: 2:45-3:00 PM

How badly will IPv6 screw up telecommunications? Where are the areas of telecom that will see the greatest impact? And what can be done to fix it?

With the recent buzz around World IPv6 Day and the exhaustion of top-level IPv4 address allocations, organizations are starting to seriously look at exactly what is involved with migrating to IPv6… and asking questions about what this means for all their VoIP and Unified Communications systems. Given that the reality is that a “IPv6-only” world is a distant future, questions are particularly being asked around how those telecommunications systems will work during the transition period from IPv4 to IPv6.

In this session, Voxeo’s Dan York will explore where IPv6 and telecom play nice together and where there are serious minefields that may restrict telecom from working over IPv6, including:

  • how the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) has serious transition issues
  • how embedded devices such as handsets face numerous obstacles
  • the top 5 challenges facing VoIP and UC application developers
  • what role DNS plays in the transition and the issues that lie therein
  • the added complexities of debugging – and of the larger ecosystem of applications

Beyond simply listing the problems, York will outline potential solutions, relay work being done with industry groups such as the SIP Forum and provide pointers to resources and ways that people can get involved with helping find more solutions to enable telecom to move smoothly into the world of IPv6.

Tuesday, June 28

Driving Communications Directly Into The Web Browser: The RTCWEB Initiative

Jose de Castro, Chief Architect, Voxeo
Date: Tuesday, June 28
Time: 10:00 – 10:15 AM

What if you could just go to a web page and start talking or chatting to someone through your web browser – without installing a specific plugin or having to use a Flash application? What if this real-time communication worked across any browser on your system? What if it even worked in a mobile web browser? And what if this all could be done using industry standards like HTML5 and JavaScript?

This is the promise of “RTCWeb”, an industry initiative started in late 2010 and now picking up speed through work in both the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and World-Wide Web Consortium (W3C). In this session, Voxeo Labs’ Chief Architect Jose de Castro will explore:

  • how real-time communication occurs in web browsers today
  • the goals of the RTCWeb initiative and how important it is
  • the status of the RTCWeb work in both the IETF (RTCWEB) and W3C (WebRTC)
  • potential APIs and frameworks supporting the initiative
  • source code and other resources available today

Jose will conclude his talk with live demonstrations of new bleeding edge work showing that this technology is not a dream but is in fact very real.

Voice 3.0 Panel

Date: Tuesday, June 28
Time: 11:20 AM

Voxeo CEO Jonathan Taylor will join a panel on discussing what is next for voice communications.

Wednesday, June 29

Communicating Beyond The Horizon

Johnny Diggz, Founder, Geeks Without Bounds
Date: Wednesday, June 29
Time: 2:30-2:45 PM

When traditional means of communications don’t work (or cease to work), whether due to natural disaster, politically-charged conflict, or poverty/neglect, geeks around the world are banding together to effectively re-route the paths of communications to keep the channels open.

In this session, Geeks Without Bounds (GWOB) Founder Johnny Diggz will show how emerging communication technologies are enabling crisis response teams to rapidly respond to unfolding situations and offer specific examples including:

  • how protesters in Egypt re-rerouted twitter feeds when the government shut off the Internet
  • how collaborative tools like Skype, Frontline SMS and Ushahidi’s crisis mapping software were combined within minutes after the Christchurch Earthquake to save lives

Diggz will bring stories of how these technologies are changing the crisis response community and how hackers and geeks from around the world have joined forces to build ad-hoc communications tools, towers and tethered balloons to extend our ears to listen beyond the communications horizon.